This tutorial covers the exact same ground as my previous one, creating a RAID1 Array. But this time it’s command line baby. Aside from impressing your friends and family, knowing how to create a RAID array using the DiskPart command line tool is useful because it allows you to script drive and volume manipulation. This can be a lifesaver for sysadmins.
Here’s my first shot at a howto by way of screencast. This tutorial shows you how to add a mirrored drive array in Windows Server 2003 (and XP).
Again, this is my first stab at this, so have some patience on the technology side. What the heck is the best way to thumbnail a 800×600 movie in a blog post column anyway?
Windows groups can be squirrely. The key to grocking them is knowing the order windows processes, or “expands”, them in.
The rule of thumb is that a group can have as a member any other type of group that has already been expanded. For example, the local group is the most flexible because it’s expanded last. Pretty much anything can be a member of a local group because by the time the server’s authority expands it, all the other group memberships are known. Global groups, on the other hand, because they’re expanded first, are heavily restricted. At the time they’re expanded, we know very little: The client’s domain starts with the user’s SID and begins expansion from there.
“What is a Group?” has a set of nice hand-scrawled diagrams to walk you through it all.
Dreams do come true! FFDeploy is a deployment tool for Firefox, allowing you to automatically install Firefox along with any extensions, themes, and pre-config options you like.
A bunch of Unix admins apply the “never have to touch the client computer directly” mentality to Windows:
Once upon a time, in spring 2000 to be exact, a merry band of system managers from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology set out on a mission, to apply their well tempered Unix knowledge to Windows 2000. Against all odds, they came back, mission accomplished (sort of) and were still able to tell their story.
A LOT of good stuff here on automating the administration of Windows client computers as much as possible. And not just Win2K, a lot of this stuff covers XP too.
Driver Packs might be useful when we look at doing unattended installs of Windows XP boxes in the future. They are collections of all the common drivers for all kinds of hardware, far beyond what comes with the Win XP install media. You can slipstream into a Windows install CD (slipstreaming is inserting drivers and other add-ons into your Windows Install CD), and have the Windows detect & install the drivers automatically without having to worry about installing/setting up the drivers for each computer configuration or install case.